bible just proved older!

dad said:

They read it like it was the very word of God, sacred, true, holy, and right, not like pagan fables.

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You obviously know nothing whatsoever of ANE cultures or their literature. Why do you think you can make statements about things when you are in complete ignorance of them?

You seem to think something can not be figurative and still be "sacred, true, holy and right".

Although others have come and gone, you are currently in the role of that YEC who is actually a damage to the cause of Young Earth Creationism. Sometimes I wonder whether those like you are actually evolutionists in disguise since you do so much to damage the YEC cause. But every time I think that the imposter is too much of a parody of YEC'ism, it turns out that they are actually a YEC. I suppose I should be thanking you for helping me in the effort to show the problems with YEC'ism, but I don't think you would see it as a compliment.

dad, all you have shown is that the text was faithfully passed down, which I agree with. What I asked for was evidence that ANE cultures like the Israelites believed their creation stories to be strict literal history.

I have already given a great deal of evidence for this earlier, if you care to check, but you have given nothing but your uninformed opinion. And the fact that you are equating an ancient cultures belief in a figurative literary rendition of actual events with a "fable" just shows you have no idea what you are talking about on this subject.

dad said:

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Some Things are above the laws of mere physics. This isn't speculation. It is proved with the bible and eyewitness testimony, healings, miracles, etc. And science can't prove otherwise! Things of the box could still be true or false, by the measurements of the box, but the aspects like orgins and dating that involve a spiritual component need be taken out of their tiny jurisdiction.

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This does not work. You cannot simply claim the things you need for your belief to be true to be "above the laws".

If you do that, anyone else can do that - and that destroys the basis for communication.

See, the article cited in the OP is wrong. The texts found are clever forgeries from the 19th century. That shows the truth - there is no God. Christians know that and have to resort to criminal means to continue their policy of world domination.

Ah, it was in the "Why can't Creationists just say this" thread. But here it is for your review. I expect you will just "hand wave" it away rather than bother to consider it seriously, but there is always hope:


Why should we not consider Genesis 1 and 2 as strict literal history? First of all, I would recommend this article to you, as it has some very solid analysis:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Bible-Science/6-02Watts.html#Making%20Sense%20of%20Genesis%201

But here is my own response:
Because Genesis is a completely different writing style and time period than the Gospels. It is comparing apples and oranges. Just because God inspired the whole Scripture, that does not mean it is written with a single style, in a single genre, with a single purpose, and should all be read the same. And nobody does. We do not read Song of Solomon the same as Paul's Epistles.

First, the time factor. Genesis is derived from oral stories nearly 2000 years older than the Gospels. Even if it was written as history (which could not have been the case), it is like comparing a history of WWII written last year with Herodotus. We just can't read them the same or apply the same standards of literalness.

Second, it is simply a different genre of writing. It is like comparing Dante's Inferno with that same modern WWII history. It is just not written for the same purpose. It is like biography compared to a novel, or poetry compared to a science book. You simply can't compare them.

More to the point, it is like comparing I Chronicles to Song of Solomon. Or Job to one of Paul's Epistles. Or Revelation to Joshua. The Bible is a compilation of literary styles compiled over hundreds and hundred of years. God had His hand on all of it, and made sure it all said what He intended it to say, but He definitely did not say it all in the same way. God has shown very well that He can convey His truths in a wide variety of presentation styles.

The Gospels were written with a specific purpose and were written at a specific time. They are a specific genre of literature. They are a type of focused biography meant to convey to the reader exactly what Jesus did, what He said and how He died and rose again. This is intended to be true and accurate history, as Luke says outright. If it is written with the intent to tell true history, then we should read it that way.

Genesis, in its early chapters, is very different. It is meant to convey great truths about God and His relationship to His Creation and with Man in particular. It conveys those great truths in a powerful and evocative way very much in style and format like the myth-epics very common in the ancient neareast. At the time these accounts were first told orally and even when they were first written down (as inspired by God), no one wrote literal history, and no one expected to be reading literal history, as I have been pointing out for a long time, and which most Biblical scholars readily acknowledge. Professor Luke Timothy Johnson recently responded to an email of mine, confirming what I am saying. It is not something new or original being said, it is a belief about Genesis as early as many of the Church Fathers and many Jewish scholars before that. In a way that we have a hard time getting "our heads around", as they say, the ancients had no problem viewing their stories about their past as "real" and "true" regardless of their historicity. They didn't even think about strict historicity. No, not even in the genealogies.

I would highly recommend reading once again the quote by C.S. Lewis here to get a better idea of what I am discussing:

http://www.christianforums.com/t1155784-time-for-a-lewis-update.htmlhttp://www.christianforums.com/t1155784-time-for-a-lewis-update.html

The point is the same as with the Gospels: we should read it the way it was intended. If the original writers of Genesis did not intend it to be read as literal history, and the original readers did not read it that way, then why should we? Isn't that actually contrary to good interpretation, to read a different meaning into a text than was originally intended just because it fits with our modern sensibilities?

It simply makes no sense to assume strict literal historicity in early ancient texts as a default. It would be a major departure from everything that was written at the time. Sure, God could have done it, but why should we assume it that He did? Just because that is how we write and think about our past today, so many thousands of years later?

We also have the evidence from the text itself. While many fundamentalist scholars have wasted a lot of ink in forcing the two different creation accounts to fit together and retain literalness, you have to admit that their ultimate conclusions are not very convincing unless you are fully dedicated to the endeavor to begin with. Very often these workarounds don't even agree. Some say they are discussiing different aspects of the same creation period, some say it is a different, but still literal, process. But when you consider that many ancient neareastern cultures had double accounts which similarly contradicted each other in detail and sequence, but still held both to be very true and important stories about their past, it becomes much easier to consider that the Hebrew origin stories are the same. They DO contradict if they are read literally. They DON'T contradict if they are read figuratively, as symbolic and typological accounts.


As St. Augustine said about the danger of reading something literally which was intended to be read figuratively:
I recently took a lecture course on the ANE. I went back and re-listened to the relevant parts of the lecture series entitled "Ancient Neareastern Mythology" by Shalom L. Goldman. Here is his bio so you can see that this guy knows his stuff:


"Shalom L. Goldman is an Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. He completed his undergraduate work at New York University and received his M.A. from Columbia University. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in the study of Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern texts from New York University. Prior to taking his position at Emory, Professor Goldman taught at Dartmouth College. He has been a visiting professor at Brown, Case Western, and Ohio State.

Professor Goldman is the editor of Hebrew and the Bible in America, and the author of God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination."

I sent an email to Dr. Goldman recently asking his opinion on this issue, and he completely agreed with my position, here are two quotes from that lecture series (which is excellent, btw):

"Now, the gods in those creation stories [speaking here of the Egyptian creation stories] appear in multiple and conflicting accounts. There is no attempt at consistency either within any given account or across accounts."

He then goes on to compare this with the similar contradiction between the two Hebrew creation accounts. Then, later:

"Among the Hittites and among the Caananites, in those cultures, there are mulitple and sometimes conflicting accounts [of creation]. There is no attempt at consistency and no claim to consistency."

And, yet, these ancients still believed these stories, and told them all even though they conflicted. They were still "real" in a very important sense even though they realized these various accounts could not all be strictly historically accurate. Those factual inconsistencies didn't seem to bother them in the least.

Exactly what I expected. All wind and no substance. Not a single refutation, just a bunch of denial. Very poor job.

Simple contradiction is not a valid argument. Back it up.

Again, you are embarrasing your fellow YEC's, I am sure.

dad said:

You seem quite concerned with what men think. In the teachings of men, and in what they might think. Basically, the crux of the matter seems to be I don't agree that the overall average so to speak, of what other peoples (than God's) were doing or writing, or thinking has a lot to do with things!
It all tends to lead down the old garden path of thinking, where the end result is to view tGod's word as fables, and the same caliber of writings as the other books of men.

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But you are basing what Genesis says on the views of Men as well: YOURSELF and other fundamentalists! When you insist on a literal/historical reading, that is a human choice among a variety of possibilities. The question is whether it is the best choice.

When you have a people like the Israelites who grew up in and around other cultures, and God wants to convey important messages to them, why would He not use the literary style that they can make sense of? These are human beings, and have (as we do) cultural biases and habits, ways of telling stories about themselves and their past, for example. Now, should God tell the story about what happened during His creation process in the manner that WE would find valuable and give credence to, or in a way that would be meaningful to the hearers and readers for thousand of years? Would He not expect us to grasp this simple concept, coming later and time and, thus, being able to figure this out?

And, as evidence of this, we can see the very clear parallels between Genesis account and the other ANE cosmogonies. The difference, of course, is the the Jewish stories are based on the true events, and convey, in figurative and typological and poetic language common of the time, the TRUE and REAL events in a way that provides us with what is most important: God's messages to us about the WHO and WHY, not the WHEN and HOW.

And, your fear that this will lead to a treatment of the Genesis account as a "fable" simply shows your lack of understanding of how these early cultures would have viewed their stories. Today, we only put value or credibility on something to the extent it is literal and historical. That is a modern bias. The ANE cultures, including the Israelites would definitely have never thought of their creation stories as "mere fable", as something not true or real, even though they read it figuratively.

Here is a very useful bit from C.S. Lewis. I would urge you to read and consider it:

I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what "derived from" means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately, his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at work. Thus at every step in what is called--a little misleadingly--the "evolution" of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. An no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.

Thus something originally merely natural--the kind of myth that is found amongst most nations--will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature--chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of Gods word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way. There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is not less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivet, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, not doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form--something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalists view of the Bible and the Roman Catholics view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done--especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

dad said:

A literal/historical reading within reason, yes. But how many interpretaions were there several hundred years ago that did not take the garden and the flood as real?! If you admit that, you'd have to admit that the mind twisters that exist now, are merely compromise attempts at twisting the bible to try to fit with science. (of the box no less)

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Every interpretation at that time would not have taken the garden and flood as literal, historical events. Literal history was not being written at that time. This is the point.

dad said:

Because He was dealing with substance, and not just copying pagan styles! Right from the garden, those of His seed were taught, and watched over, and brought along. Whatever Cain's seed, or those who did not believe in the Living God did, is of little consequece.

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The question is NOT whether the text was maintained in good order, the question would be how that story would have been told in the first place. People of that time just didn't tell their stories about the past in strict, literal/historical styles. There is simply no reason whatsoever to believe that the Israelites would have passed down an oral tradition based on a literal/historical telling of the story. They would have believed the story to be true and real, regardless, but not literal history. Show me some evidence why we should read it as strict literal/historical.

dad said:

Then maybe the other ones copied some things and the dates are wrong as to what happened when. Maybe certain things were fairly common knowledge. And where the pagans messed up, and got cosmology wrong, maybe His people, though it may sound like it a bit on the surface, were not as dumb? Maybe also, if we take into account a split, then some men would have seen a complete universe, and therefore, may only sound like they were wrong now, because we are in a physical only stage now!

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YOu are assuming, still, with your modern Western bias, that telling a story about the past in a figurative, typological style is somehow "dumb" compared to literal history. This is ridiculous, and simply shows exactly how indoctrinated in the modern empirical mindset you are. This is very ironic since you seem to argue against using modern empiricism as a basis for viewing nature, yet you do this exactly when viewing our ancient texts.

dad said:

Good, then they would have been right!

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Yes, by viewing figurative, typological and poetic renditions of past events as valuable, real and true in a deep sense, they would have been right. I am glad we agree on that point.

dad said:

Yes, but not applicable to scripture as it was verified each step of the way, and not subject to significant error, or evolution at all. It's not like some tale whispered in the air to many people that came out different!

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Again, you are being amazingly dense here, to put it bluntly. You are assuming that all tales about the past must have started as literal stories and would only fail to be literal stories if they got distorted along the way. Since you don't believe they got distorted, they must still be literal. But where you go incredibly wrong is in assuming that they would have been literal to begin with! If they were told as figurative, full of symbol and typology and poetry from the very first telling, and they were kept pure by God all the way through, you STILL GET NON-LITERAL!

dad, every argument you make is based on a single incorrect assumption:

true = literal/historical

figurative/typological = false, not real, not true

As long as you have this fallacy in your head, you will never get any of it right.

Vance said:

But you are basing what Genesis says on the views of Men as well: YOURSELF and other fundamentalists! When you insist on a literal/historical reading, that is a human choice among a variety of possibilities. The question is whether it is the best choice.

And, your fear that this will lead to a treatment of the Genesis account as a "fable" simply shows your lack of understanding of how these early cultures would have viewed their stories. Today, we only put value or credibility on something to the extent it is literal and historical. That is a modern bias. The ANE cultures, including the Israelites would definitely have never thought of their creation stories as "mere fable", as something not true or real, even though they read it figuratively.

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Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience; . . . Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know. ~ James Barr Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University in England

2+2 could be '22', it could be '17', it could be 'green'. People who insist that it is always '4' are SO boring.

Vance said:

When you have a people like the Israelites who grew up in and around other cultures, and God wants to convey important messages to them, why would He not use the literary style that they can make sense of? These are human beings, and have (as we do) cultural biases and habits, ways of telling stories about themselves and their past, for example. Now, should God tell the story about what happened during His creation process in the manner that WE would find valuable and give credence to, or in a way that would be meaningful to the hearers and readers for thousand of years? Would He not expect us to grasp this simple concept, coming later and time and, thus, being able to figure this out?

And, as evidence of this, we can see the very clear parallels between Genesis account and the other ANE cosmogonies. The difference, of course, is the the Jewish stories are based on the true events, and convey, in figurative and typological and poetic language common of the time, the TRUE and REAL events in a way that provides us with what is most important: God's messages to us about the WHO and WHY, not the WHEN and HOW.

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Either/Or fallacy

There are elements that spoke directly to the immediate culture that are missed by modern readers AND the narative was understood to be literal.

Vance said:

Here is a very useful bit from C.S. Lewis. I would urge you to read and consider it:

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I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur. Thus any statement put into our Lord's mouth by the old texts, which, if he had really made it, would constitute a prediction of the future, is taken to have been put in after the occurrence which it seemed to predict. This is very sensible if we start by knowing that inspired prediction can never occur. Similarly in general, the rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous in general never occurs. Now I do not here want to discuss whether the miraculous is possible. I only want to point out that this is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon 'If miraculous, then unhistorical' is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing. On this they speak simply as men; men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in. Fern-seed and Elephants

You have already been shown how your quote of Barr is out of context and misleading, so your continued use of it in that way is bordering on dishonest.

Further, C.S. Lewis had no problem with the supernatural at all, which you should know since the entire quote, which includes that statement, has been posted in threads you have been involved in. So, again, a bit misleading of you.

Regardless, you are engaging in a number of fallacies in that last paragraph, because nobody is talking in the least about a denial of the supernatural. The text is not regarded as figurative because literal would mean supernatural. Even a figurative reading would be simply a figurative rendition of a supernatural event. So, your entire point is moot. The text is regarded as figurative because of literary, cultural and historical analysis, coupled with a lack of theological problems with such a figurative reading.

The only argument for literal/historical is "that is how it seems to me" or "that is how my church has always read it", neither of which hold any water.

Provide some evidence that the Israelite peoples of 2000 BC would have read the text as literal. I have provided evidence that they would NOT have, but no one has provided ANY evidence to the contrary.

bevets said:

Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience; . . . Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know. ~ James Barr Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University in England

2+2 could be '22', it could be '17', it could be 'green'. People who insist that it is always '4' are SO boring.




Either/Or fallacy

There are elements that spoke directly to the immediate culture that are missed by modern readers AND the narative was understood to be literal.



I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur. Thus any statement put into our Lord's mouth by the old texts, which, if he had really made it, would constitute a prediction of the future, is taken to have been put in after the occurrence which it seemed to predict. This is very sensible if we start by knowing that inspired prediction can never occur. Similarly in general, the rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous in general never occurs. Now I do not here want to discuss whether the miraculous is possible. I only want to point out that this is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon 'If miraculous, then unhistorical' is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing. On this they speak simply as men; men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in. Fern-seed and Elephants

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You have been shown before that the quote from Barr is misleading and not a real indication of what Barr thinks. Remember he wrote 'Escaping Fundamentalism'. It is intellectually dishonest to continue using it as support for a literalist reading of Genisis.

dad, you are also assuming that, just because one scroll of a few verses was dated to be 7th century bce, that the Bible is at least that old.

Thing with the Rig Veda is this: there's cultural proof that the composition is probably that old. There isn't that for the entire Bible.

The Bible was written in a vast piece meal over ~900 years; the oldest written parts would date to the late 900's bce, and the traditions themselves wouldn't have culturally been around later than ~1250 bce. You still must make up a gap of ~800 years to at least when the Epic of Gilgamesh was written, let alone traditionally told orally, which would make it even older.